Month: August 2004

Categories
RDF

RDF Bees

Did you know that when you search on the term “RDF weblog” in Google, this site is the first result? Does this mean I hold the fate of RDF and weblogging in my fragile little hands? Well, let’s see if I can do something with all that power.

RDF, or should I say RDF and OWL (since the two ran off to Vegas and got married a while back) are seen as the tools for the Semantic Web. Rather fine and dandy, but until that brilliant bit of lightning hits us from the sky, we’ll see if we can’t make the pampered little darlings put in a fair day’s work.

If interest in RDF is not waning, as I was assured in my last post, then where are the places one can find out information about what’s happening? I pulled my own small list together:

  • Dave Beckett’s Resource Description Framework page, needs to be on any list for RDF resources, though I’m not sure all or even most of the real world applications of RDF are appearing in the page. However, it is a good resource for keeping up with the APIs, editors, tools, specs, and some of the more scientific work.
  • Though RDFWeb focuses on FOAF, FOAF is it; where it’s happening right now when it comes to RDF.
  • The RDF weblog aggregator Planet RDF is really the site that should own ‘RDF and weblog’. It pulls together entries from various RDF interest weblogs, including yours truly, into one spot. If anything can get the word of RDF as ‘real stuff’ out into the world, I think weblogs writing about ongoing efforts is the trick; using online or syndication feed aggregators such as Planet RDF to pull it all together into one easily accessible location.
  • Once upon a time there was an RDF Interest group, but the W3C replaced it with the Semantic Web interest group. That’s because to the W3C, RDF and OWL are for the Semantic Web. Not the semantic web, which is really just people using RDF and OWL, a little bit here, and a little bit there to do interesting stuff (and someday all the bits will be all grow’d up and become Semantic Web). But still – always good to keep up with the eggheads. (Besides, what’s not to like about a group that uses words like ’smushing’?)
  • O’Reilly’s XML.com is another resource, though the site focuses on all things XML not just RDF/OWL stuff. Still, it’s a decent resource.

So far, that’s what I have for good, centralized locations of information about what’s happening with RDF. A start, but incomplete.

In the comments to the last post, several commercial uses of RDF were mentioned; what I would like to see is some form of aggregation of RDF/OWL commercial application efforts. These are the ones that are hard to find; yet these are the spreaders of the meme – the bees, if you will, in the semantic web orchard, with bits and pieces of RDF/OWL stuck to their little furry bodies as they flit about, from venture capitalist to venture capitalist.

Categories
Books Writing

Book publishers suck

I’ve been in negotiations for over four months with a publisher on a book. After the last book deal fell through with negative reprecussions for me, I’ve been more wary when it comes to contracts.

One issue with the new publisher has been about a clause in the contract that the publisher could bill me for royalities paid out if the books are returned.

With my previous books, the publisher holds a percentage of royalities aside for coverage of book returns; or hold royalities for 3-9 months for the same reason. They also keep most of the profits from the book. In exchange, the author isn’t suddenly presented with a bill when they’re expecting a royalty check.

I’ve earned out my royalities and advances on all the books I’ve authored or co-authored but Developing ASP Components, second edition (because Microsoft came out with a new architecture just as we went to print), and the recent Practical RDF (I have hopes I’ll earn out the advance on this one, but slowly). Both of these books have been with O’Reilly Publishing (who has an uncomplicated contract without a lot of ‘gotcha’ clauses about billing the author, may I add).

However, the publisher I’ve been dealing with not only wanted to hold payouts for several months, reserve 25% of the royalities for return, but they also wanted to bill me for any returns beyond that. Paired with very low royality–eight percent–I had to decline. Disappointing, and discouraging, but these things happen.

Now it gets good.

I didn’t hear anything more for about a month or so. Then, out of the blue this last week the publisher came back and said they would strike this clause, in addition to paying half the indexing fee (having me pay all the indexing fee was something else I wasn’t happy about). It wasn’t a great deal, but I’ve spent so much time on this, I said I would agree and asked to see the new contract.

Well today, I heard that the publishing company has decided to keep the clause in after all, but that they “never invoke it, so it doesn’t mean anything”. If a clause in a contract doesn’t mean anything, why keep it in the contract? Do they think me stupid?

Needless to say, that’s the end of my relationship with this publisher.

This is two bad experiences with publishers in a row trying to get a book out, and spending over a year in the process. Frankly, the news today was like getting sucker punched.

Categories
People Political

In Defense of Michelle Malkin: The Case for Integrity

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Michelle Malkin appeared on Hardball yesterday and much buzz is circulating about the experience. As to be expected, the liberals side with Matthews, while the conservatives leap to her defense.

Norm Jenson posted video clips from the interview in question, and after watching them, I wrote the following in Norm’s comments:

I hate to say it Norm, but I don’t blame Malkin for leaving in a huff. Chris Matthews was beligerant, didn’t allow anyone to answer, talked just to hear himself talk, and came out as an asshole.

He wasn’t as bad with Larry Thurlow, but he was absolutely horrible with Malkin.

Personally, I would have slugged him and then walked off the set.

Matthews didn’t play hardball with Malkin – he lowballed her; using an unrelenting, rapid fire badgering in order to discredit not what she was saying, but her, specifically. He literally attacked Malkin, never once giving her time to fully think, must less answer a question.

More than that, though, was his behavior before the show. I am not a fan of Malkin’s, as she herself has noted. But I have no reason to disbelieve her when she talks about her conversation with Matthews about her age before the show started. And I have to share her disgust with this. He’s a professional, and knows that this type of conversation right before going on TV can rattle a guest, and deliberately undermine their confidence–putting them on the defensive even before the questions started.

As for the responses, Atrios referring to Malkin as “LuLu”, played both the gender and youth cards to discredit Malkin rather than Malkin’s writing or statements. In fact, I found that this is common for him. If the only way he can discredit Malkin is to use statements such as this, the sooner he drops back into obscurity, the better.

In the recent discussion about Malkin’s book, “In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror”, Eric Muller and Greg Robinson focused on what Malkin wrote, her historical research practices, and her previous statements. They were unrelenting in putting out facts to discredit Malkin’s book; but I don’t remember either of these gentlemen condescendingly patting her on the head verbally, or referring to her as “LuLu”.

David Neiwert doesn’t play gender or age cards, but he also declares Matthews the winner in this exchange:

It used to be infuriating watching Matthews’ show and seeing Hitchens, Coulter, Sullivan and that whole crowd simply waltz away with a free propaganda ride. I have no idea what finally turned Matthews’ old juices back on, but this (combined with his recent exchange with Bush propagandist Matthew Dowd) are certainly welcome signs. When he was just doing a column, Matthews was a solid reporter and smart analyst, but it all seemed to fly out the window once he got the MSNBC gig. Nice to see some hints of it resurface.

To call these tactics a return to solid journalism is ludicrous. Just because it’s on ‘our side’, doesn’t make these tactics somehow blessed with credibility and righteousness.

Do I agree with the claims of the Swiftboat Veterans? No, but I find that a calm recital of facts on the issue makes a better argument than histrionics (thanks to Tim for the link). And bluntly, as the Citizen Times said:

Inordinate amounts of time have been burned up by reporters and editors tracking down the charges of SBVT, time that could have been far better spent finding actual positions that will affect us tomorrow.

We hope this is the last hurrah for this type of nonsense.

Otherwise, in 2040 we may be having the same debate about the awards some soldier is earning in Baghdad today.

I would like to add to this that enough time has been spent on Bush’s military record, too. “Last hurrah for this type of nonsense” is about right.

Integrity starts at home, folks. Our shit does, too, stink.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Unscheduled downtime

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The server hosting my domains has been under attack from the spammers, and ended up going down yesterday afternoon and today. Downtime wasn’t long – long enough to eliminate the problem; but I’m concerned this is the start of a persistent problem when I heard what caused the shutdowns: yesterday’s attack was a Movable Type comment spammer attack, and today’s problem was a copy of mt-blacklist that spiraled out of control.

Hosting Matters, my hosting company, was on the problem immediately, and solved it quickly – but there is only so much they can do. The problem is installations of Movable Type that are wide open, or only partially protected. And it seems like part of the problem could be inproper installations of mt-blacklist.

Those of you with Movable Type are going to have to put whatever measures you can into place, not only to protext yourself, but also to protect others on your servers. I imagine that if enough hosts run into this problem with Movable Type, they may restrict its use.

No, let’s be a bit stronger with this statement: they will start to restrict its use.

If you’re running Movable Type, you really need to upgrade to whatever installation is the most secure, and you’re going to have to install mt-blacklist for that installation. At this time, this is the only known comment spam application that seems to help with the problems. I believe that the most recent release of Movable Type is 3.0, a developer’s release; Jay Allen has put out an emergency release for this version.

However, I can’t recommend that people go to a developer’s release unless they’re comfortable working with a version of the software that is intended primarily for developers. Not unless Six Apart comes out with some form of official recommendation that Movable Type users go this route. I’ve sent an email to the folks there, telling them that I’m getting emails from folks asking help, and what course they should follow. When I hear back, I’ll post an update.

If the official word is to go to 3.0 and the emergency release of mt-blacklist, and you’re having problems with the upgrade or installation, I’ll volunteer to help those who need help, either with upgrading to 3.0, installing mt-blacklist, or both. I’ll also help Movable Type users to close down older comments – older comments are the ones being attacked–using direct SQL statements, as long as they’re willing to give me temporary database access. Knowing webloggers, I’m sure that others with experience with Movable Type will also offer their help.

In addition, those with the 2.6x installations that have followed these comment spam protection steps that I outlined long ago have said that they haven’t had comment spam problems since. I don’t know for sure if this is still true or not. If true, and you don’t want to go to 3.x, you might want to consider checking out these steps. Again, holler if you need help.

You might be thinking of jumping to WordPress right now just to escape the comment problem. I can understand your wanting to do this–the comment spam problem is out of control. However, if you’re happy with the tool and Six Apart and the only reason you would do this is comment moderation, you might want to hold on making a switch until you see what the 3.1 release has; then if you decide you want to make a move to WordPress, or Textpattern, or any other tools, and need help, holler.

Regardless, you can’t leave your Movable Type installations unprotected, with open comments. You’re going to get yourself kicked off your server.

As a note unrelated to Movable Type, email spammers have been running ‘dictionary listing’ spam attacks against my domain and others. What this means is that the spammers randomly generate names, attach these to domain addresses and send them out. If a name doesn’t bounce back from the email server as not belonging to a person, the spammers then know that they’ve most likely found a valid email address.

Hosting Matters is going through some extraordinary efforts to try and stop these attacks, and there is a chance that emails to me have been bounced, or will be bounced. If so, send me an email to my gmail account, listed in the sidebar, and I’ll see about getting you back in.

Update

Since Hosting Matters isn’t comfortable specifically saying that MT was the problem this week (because there were the spambots, too), and since the folks that asked for help haven’t said anything online, I do come across as alarmist.

Perhaps I am. I’ve been told that MT 3.1 should be out by month end of so. Since there is little outward indication of problems with MT other than this post, I withdraw my statements in this post.

Best of luck to the Movable Type users moving forward.

Categories
Burningbird

It is all about me

I’ve added an ‘about me’ link to the sidebar. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, though my About page is probably not as professional as many of the ones I’ve read elsewhere. Oh well — life is full of wonderous variety, as they say in the movies.

Seriously, when I get the ‘professional pages’ in my site up (not this weblog, no worries there– it will always remain as funky as I can make it), I’ll replace the About Page; but I figured it’s fun for now.

A succinct version of this page could be that I’m a Moron on the Pilgrim Specification Adherance Scale. I hope that I’m a fairly successful Moron, and that I keep my forays into being an Asshole to a minimum. I do try, though, for the Expert Moron ranking in the technologies I work with frequently–except for syndication feeds I hasten to add, where I’m happy just to remain a simple Moron.

When it comes to RDF, I even wavered for a time as Angelic (though some thought I tended more to Asshole than Angel); but then the W3C came out with changes in the released specifications, and my work was pushed back into being Moronic again.

Ain’t that just the way it goes?

In the About page, I also mention my Port-a-Bloggy business, and the camera fund. I have a new port-a-bloggy customer waiting in the wings for WordPress 1.3 to release and then *poof* I’ll have him off Movable Type and into WordPress, quicker than a cat can clean its whiskers with a spit soaked paw. Just think–I can do the same for you.

I’ll have you know, that WordPress is very sexy. Just ask any WP site owner, they’ll say that their sex appeal has increased by a factor of 2 since they moved to WordPress. And you’ve never been moved until you’ve been moved by someone like me.

I did want to say thanks to those who have helped so far with the camera fund, or have trusted me enough to manage the move of their weblogs. I also wanted to thank those who have come out with tips on what to do with my current quirky camera. Because of them, I can continue to take the photos just like the ones posted this week until I do get my new camera.

Those with a modem, tremble with fear.